SteveG's comment on last week's post about discipline put me on a mental train of thought that has clarified and contextualized a whole bunch of ideas that have been stewing in my brain for a while now. In the interest of this whole blogging-more-often thing I'm trying, I thought I'd share.
My parents are excellent parents. Not perfect, of course - a perfect parent is an impossibility because a perfect person is an impossibility - but pretty darn awesome. I attribute to them many, many good things that I have learned and become over the years. Most importantly, they can be credited for teaching me to love God, others, and myself in an ordered way. This is an ability by which the quality of human existence is measured, most vitally at the end of every person's life. If, by the grace of God, I reach heaven some day, much of the credit for it must go to my parents.
And the reason they could do what they did so well is, I've finally realized, largely due to the way they approached the task of being parents to us children: not as a job at which they might fail or excel, but as a relationship. It was important to them not that they *achieve* in any outwardly visible way, but that they *love* to the best of their ability. The quality of their parenting would ultimately be self-measured not by the impressiveness of anything we children did or became, but by the quality of our relationships with God and those around us, which would be a reflection of and a reflection upon our relationships with our parents themselves.
They made what are, culturally, some fairly unorthodox choices, not least of which was the decision to be open to as many children as they had. With today's high-pressure attitude toward parenting, it seems like a lot of people understandably feel overwhelmed by the idea of more than a couple of kids. The array of things to "get right" is dizzying. To make the exactly correct combination of research-endorsed parenting choices with one or two children is daunting; to make it six or eight times over seems impossible. But my parents, by being able to see past the societally standard idea of parenting, were able to embrace the idea of a big family without fear, and thus to provide us with one of the best advantages of our childhood, the fact that there were so many of us. The necessary decrease of material goods and opportunities was a small price to pay for the way that my parents loved us better by welcoming all of us. Having my siblings to love is one of the best blessings of my life, and it didn't hurt that growing up as part of a passel of children provided daily object lessons in the importance of selflessness and the truth that love is not finite.
Mom and Dad did some other unusual things besides just having a bunch of us. For instance, throughout all the years I lived at home, I never had a curfew. This was not because my parents didn't care where I was or what I'd be doing. We talked about those things, and occasionally the discussion would include a mention of when I should be home (although they never once stayed up to check that I was home on time) but in general, I was in charge of my own nights, and did not have a curfew on weekends or in summer. Some of my friends thought this was crazy, and I'm sure some of their parents did too, but to me - and to my parents as well, I think - it wasn't about the rule or the lack thereof. Giving me the authority to make my own decisions about when to come home at night was the natural continuation of a relationship we'd spent a decade and a half building. They trusted me to make good decisions, just as I trusted them to support me and love me no matter what. I did make good decisions, too. My parents might have been surprised if they had known just how late I sometimes chose to come home (or maybe not - I've been surprised in retrospect to learn just how much they knew) but they wouldn't have been at all surprised or displeased by the things I was doing. It was important to me that I not disappoint them, even when I was doing things they'd never find out about. They must have known this, and so the lack of curfew was not an act of irresponsibility but an act of trust on my parents' part, and one that had a net positive on our relationship and the development of my character.
So my parents did some stuff that is not normally considered award-winning parenting, yet it was! (Well, they haven't won any awards yet as far as I know, but look how well I turned out! Shouldn't that count for something?) But my point, in case it's gotten obscured here, is not that good parents make the choices my parents made. No, my point in using those two examples of unorthodox choices that turned out to be good is this: being a good parent is not about the choices. It's about the relationship. I'm not making a banner that says "No Curfews for All! Kids Will Turn Out GREAT!" But for me personally, forgoing the curfew was an excellent choice, and my parents didn't care about whether it would make them look irresponsible. They were willing to buck a cultural norm (although if you knew my parents, you'd know that bucking cultural norms is more a way of life for them than it is an act of bravery) for the sake of their relationship with me, not to make me like them but to show me that they trusted me and expected me to be responsible for living up to the standards they'd set for my life. And it worked really, really well.
I think I've mentioned before that the only piece of parenting advice my father has ever given me was "trust yourself." I took it to heart, figuring that advice from Dad would help me to be the kind of parent he is, and his words have been my talisman through the past twenty months. They're my best weapon against doubt and against feeling overwhelmed.
But the funny thing is, I've just realized that I might not have fully understood the truth of what my dad was trying to tell me. I took "trust yourself" to mean that I should make confident choices, that knowing myself to be competent, I should be able to relax in the knowledge that I could do this job well.
While my dad would probably agree with that statement, I don't think it's what he really meant. He wasn't intending that I should take comfort in the fact that I could *do* parenting well; he was intending that I should take comfort in the fact that I could *be* a parent well. Because - the strangeness of its various requisite tasks notwithstanding - being a parent is not something radically new. I've spent my whole life learning to love those around me, learning that what is important is not how I act upon them but how I respond to them, learning to be a bigger, better person through relationships. Being a parent is merely a continuation of that. In some ways it is radically new, most notably in the shock of the huge, overwhelming love I have for Camilla and in the enormity of the fact that I am responsible for her. But those things don't change the truth: before she came along, I already knew how to do this. I knew how to be needed, I knew how to have a conversation, I knew how to love and be loved.
Trusting myself means resting secure in that knowledge, and letting all the minutiae of parenthood fall into place in light of the love we have for our daughter and the love she has for us, and our real dedication to putting that love first and growing it in an ordered way.
And that's why, as my father himself (hope it's okay that I outed you, Dad!) puts it so eloquently, debating the minutiae is conducting the discussion on the wrong axis. That's not to say that information can't be useful, but ultimately, *what* decisions we make as parents will never be as important as *why* we make them, because it's the foundation of our relationships with our children that makes all the difference. To me, anyway, that's a remarkably freeing realization.
